If bulking up is your goal, let me start by telling you that hitting the all-you-can-eat trail is not the right approach. That’s a song that’s still sung by some old-schoolers, but unless you’re a genetic oddity, it’s just not going to do the trick.

Bulking up means adding muscle, not flab, and muscles only come from working out and breaking down what you already have. Diet’s important, but it’s only part of the formula. Emptying the refrigerator out every day will only work if you’re very particular about what you put in that refrigerator. And even then, without a well planned workout routine, you’ll be spinning your wheels.

In order to build a lean, muscular body, the first step has to be to learn your body – what it needs, how it works and what it responds to. That means understanding your natural growth and recovery processes, so you are in control of your results.

Here are five tips for building a solid bulking strategy to add lots of lean bulk to your frame:

Tip #1 – Set Incremental Goals

I often see novice muscle building enthusiasts giving up early because they get discouraged. They fixate on the “after” image they’ve set in their mind, and when they don’t see it materializing, their enthusiasm dies, as they realize it will take months or even years before they’ll achieve their goal.

It’s very important to realize that muscle growth occurs in spurts. When you have a good dietary and workout program, focused on muscle building, you’ll see periodic bursts of progress, but when it’s gradual, it’s sometimes hard to recognize it.

That’s why it’s best to set smaller, incremental goals. Instead of a vague objective like “bulk up” or “gain X pounds”. Setting smaller milestones for yourself, like “add 10 pounds of muscle per month” will give you something definite to measure and visible results to help keep your motivation alive.

Just in case you think that adding 10 pounds of lean muscle per month is too ambitious, let me tell you, that’s not true. If you conscientiously follow a sound muscle building diet and workout program, it is very achievable, as I outline in my 21-Day Mass-Building System.

Tip #2 – Break Down your Training Cycles into Smaller Bites

You’ve probably noticed that when you start a new program, you see great progress during the first few weeks, but then seem to hit a plateau. That’s because the body gets acclimated to the program. Initially, your body responds to the new demands placed on it, but as it gets accustomed to those demands, the body feels it less, so it responds less. Here’s a news-flash for you: nearly anything can work, but nothing works forever.

In other words, you need to change up your routine now and then, placing fresh demands on your system, to that it never gets too comfortable with the program.

Notice that I said “now and then”, not constantly. Some people think that the more changes they throw at their body, the better. But that fails to give your body time to even show that spurt of growth. Give your muscles an opportunity to adapt to any new program, changing only when you see progress begin to slow. Otherwise, you risk confusing your muscles, seeing little benefit.

Typically, that adaptation takes around three weeks. By that time, your progress will possibly begin to slow down a little, and your muscles and your mind will both be ready for some new stimulation.

Tip #3 – Manage your Calorie-Cycle for Maximum Muscle Growth

Calorie cycling is something that competitive body builders do with great success. Before a competition, they follow a very strict diet, in order to lose any excess fat and get seriously ripped. Then, after the competition, they change their diet to regain lost weight and build new muscle mass. This means that they get bigger and more muscular with every competition.

Unfortunately, most recreational weightlifters don’t pay enough attention to their nutrition. Most of them, in fact, eat the same things, day after day. The problem with that approach is that your body can become accustomed to the same dietary routine, just like it does with the same workout routine.

There have been many studies performed that address the issue of calorie-cycling for fat-loss. But the same concept can also apply to muscle building – it simply hasn’t received as much press because fat-loss is more popular than muscle building. Nevertheless, we can learn a lot from these studies.

In a popular Forbes study, entitled Hormonal Response to Overeating, they tested a group of female test subjects that started out on a maintenance diet. When they changed to a diet of 1200-1600 surplus calories per day for 21 days, there was a steady increase in their blood tests of the 3 most powerful anabolic hormones: IGF-1, testosterone and insulin. This spike in their hormones was accompanied by some impressive solid muscular body weight gains.

Of course, they also picked up a few pounds of body fat along with those muscle gains – about half their gains were fat. But remember, this test involved diet only – no exercise. If they had also been working out and following a high-protein muscle building diet, just imagine what their lean muscle weight gains might have been.

What is to be learned here is that whenever your caloric intake is drastically increased, your body will create more anabolic hormones, driving those calories to create more lean muscle tissue, not just fat. The period of this increased anabolic hormone release lasts for about 2 weeks.

After about 2 weeks, the body adapts to the high caloric intake and muscle growth will hit a plateau. At that point, you need to back off your high food intake for a while and get your body primed for the next phase of rapid growth.

Tip #4 – Match your Diet and your Workout

When you’re training for weight loss, you need to be eating for weight loss. The same holds true if you’re trying to build muscle – train for bulking and eat for bulking – increase your calories and healthy carbohydrates like vegetables, legumes, whole grains and fruits. When you match both your diet and workout for muscle building, the synergy effect will take off and you’ll start seeing some meaningful results.

Tip #5 – Go for Progress, not Perfection

Don’t fall into the trap of always expecting ideal results. Accept the fact that nobody can always train and eat perfectly. If you cheat a little on your diet now and then, skip a meal or miss a workout, the world won’t end. So you stubbed your toe – so what? Don’t get discouraged. Just keep plugging away at it.

The nutrition expert, Dr. John Berardi said: “When it comes to real world results, there is virtually no difference between following a program 90 percent of the time and following a program 100 percent of the time. If you were stubborn enough to stick to a perfect program all day, every day, the stress and sacrifices you’d inflict on your life probably wouldn’t be worth the measly extra bit of progress, anyway.”

That 10% leeway in your program more than makes up for a little flexibility when life situations get in the way of things. If there’s a big family barbeque and you slide a little on your diet, or skip a workout to help a friend move, just count those against your 10%. Then get back on track again.

I have over 10 years of bodybuilding under my belt, and believe me, I’m not perfect. Once in a while, I give in to a junk-food craving or miss a scheduled workout. But since I’m still following my plan over 90% of the time, I’m always making progress toward my goals.

I’d advise you to stay focused on the big picture, rather than freaking out over minor mishaps. That way, you’ll always be making progress toward your ultimate goal of transforming your physique.

Incredibly, there are still some people out there saying that the best way to bulk up is to eat everything in sight. If you believe them, you really need to read this!

If you’ve been following me for any period of time, you should know by now that you can’t expect to put on any appreciable muscle mass without a diet that’s optimized for muscle building. If your diet is light on the right nutrients, you’re not only not going to succeed in bulking up, you’re at risk of losing some of that hard-earned muscle mass you already have.

That last is the fear that drives many new bodybuilders to fall for the “see-food” diet. Those diets tell you to just eat everything you can get your hands on, sometimes for months, with the promise that you’ll get big. Well, if fat is the kind of big you’re looking for, maybe. But not for muscle building competition.

It saddens me when I see a young guy with great potential ruin his physique by following such a diet. Some honestly believe the hype that tells them that excessive eating will make their muscles grow. How can anyone believe that chicken wings and jelly donuts will build muscle like brown rice, fish and whole eggs?

Don’t be a Yo-yo

It’s common practice for competitive bodybuilders to transition from mass-building programs off season to super-strict fat-loss programs before a contest. Their goal is to bulk up as much as possible, avoiding workouts that will affect their weight gain. They follow that with an intense fat-loss program, to get as ripped as possible for the show, increasing cardio, upping their activity and restricting calories.

This can work, and the approach isn’t uncommon when people first get started in bodybuilding competition. But it can go south on you when these massive weight fluctuations become as regular as the seasons and last just as long.

So if you’re buying pallets of junk-food, planning a months-long gorge-a-thon, you may want to finish reading this before you fire up the forklift. Here are five major problems with that method that you should be aware of, if you’re serious about bulking up.

Mistake #1 – You Just Get Fatter

We learned something from Christian Thibaudeau, muscle building and strength coach: “You can add size or volume to a structure either by making the existing components bigger (hypertrophy), or by increasing the number of components (hyperplasia).”

When you see hypertrophy, you may think he’s talking about muscle tissue, but he’s talking about fat. Adipocytes (fat cells) are a little like tiny bags to store fat. The more you put in them, the bigger they get. But they can only hold just so much. Your body’s not going to let a little thing like that stop it from storing energy, though. If you keep overeating for a long enough time, it’ll just make more adipocytes to handle the excess storage needs.

And that’s the problem! When you have more fat cells, it’s easier for your body to store fat. And those extra fat cells you got from all those binge-eating drills are like diamonds…. they’re forever. You never get rid of them. So when you let your body increase the number of fat cells, you’re actually making it harder to lose fat and easier to put more fat on.

That’s why adipocyte hyperplasia makes it tough for fatter people to lose fat and stay slim, while lean people may have an easier time of staying slim. Those all-you-can-eat bulking approaches can put all your hard work at risk.

Mistake #2 – Lean People can Gain More Muscle

Have you ever noticed that while most gym enthusiasts look pretty much the same all the time, physique competitors seem to get more muscular year after year? That’s because the competitors are lowering their body fat – getting ripped – every time they head to the stage. Every time they go through that cycle, their body gets better at nutrient partitioning, the process of forcing nutrients to muscle tissue rather than to fat cells.

When your caloric intake is excessive, the calories can go to either muscle or fat. When you’re calorie deficient, the necessary energy can be drawn from either muscle or fat, too. If you have good partitioning and a high metabolic rate, your body will be able to easily draw energy from fat cells and direct it to muscle cells. And over time, serious competitors can develop insulin sensitivity, which means that their systems get very efficient at storing the nutrients they consume in the muscles, either as glycogen or as muscle tissue, or in the liver, as glycogen. They also become less prone to store nutrients as body fat.

For a long time, there’s been a rule of thumb in fitness that when your body fat is in the 10-15% range, you tend to gain the most muscle, whereas in excess of 15%, you will gain more fat and less muscle. Research tends to support this. In the 1980s, Forbes published a study, showing a logarithmic relation between fat gain and lean body mass gain. The LBM gain or loss depends on how much body fat exists initially, in humans and other species. This Forbes Theory is still widely accepted today.

What this means is that the lower your body fat is when you start bulking, the better muscle gain you’ll see when you start bulking. Your insulin sensitivity will decrease as you put on more fat, and your muscle gains will decrease. That’s why  lean people usually show 30-70% LBM gains, while obese people show 30-40% LBM gains, overeating.

Mistake #3 – You Can’t Force the Muscles to Grow

Muscles grow in spurts. It doesn’t matter how much you might wish it was, it’s just not a non-stop process. And if you try to force them to grow, they’ll fight back with plateaus, over-training, injuries and burnout.

You may know someone that’s suffered some of those problems from forced training before. The same sort of problems can arise from trying to force-feed your muscles into growing, too. Overloading them with calories might work for a very short time, but eventually, you’ll experience excessive fat, poor health, bad habits and a ruined physique.

Lee Hayward and I developed the 21-Day Fast Mass training cycle in order to help avoid those problems via variety and unique muscle stimulation. It also maximizes muscle growth by taking advantage of natural anabolic growth and recover cycles.

Forgive me if this sounds obvious, but it needs to be said again and again: You have to work with your body, not against it! If you try to fight it, believe me, you’ll lose.

Mistake #4 – Cutting Gets Harder Every Time You Bulk

In my personal experience, you might get away with a traditional bulk/cutting cycle a few times in your lifetime. But the longer you train and the more experienced you become, you’ll eventually hit the point that overshooting your desired ripped look will become more and more difficult.

Remember that a person’s protein intake, testosterone level, testosterone to cortisol ratio, genetics, insulin sensitivity, muscle fiber breakdown and many other factors are only capable of producing just so much muscle tissue.

For instance, let’s say that your first bulk was from 150 to 200 pounds, after which you cut. If it was your first such cycle, the majority of those 50 pounds was probably lean muscle and you only had to cut 10 pounds or so of fat. That’s easy. Most of your gains are muscle, so your thyroid hormone will probably be well charged up. That’s how my first transformation went.

Now let’s say your second bulk is from 200-220 pounds. This time, you’ll have to bulk to 240+ in order to end up at 220 ripped. Taking 20 pounds of fat off is going to take you longer than 10 pounds.

You can see the problem, right? As you have to spend more time cutting, you have less time bulking, which means less overall muscle mass. On top of that, the longer you cut, the more likely you are to start losing muscle mass due to your caloric deficiency. That’s the last thing you want!

Mistake #5 – Bulking Can be Impractical and Overwhelming

Bulking for 4-6 months is a bear! It’s a daunting and impractical process. People can’t commit to the grocery bills, the meal prep time, the cooking time and the constant eating. It seems like they’re spending their entire waking life on just food. So pretty soon, they take shortcuts and eat what’s easy. They might see some decent gains in muscle at first, but pretty soon they hit a plateau and start storing fat.

The answer is fairly simple: Don’t go for huge gains. Set smaller goals that you can commit to, and in the long run, you’ll make faster gains.

I finished watching the food documentary Hungry For Change and as promised I have compiled all my notes into fun sound bites. Get ready and let me know which ones stood out to you below.

1. At least 1/3 of all women and 1/4 of all men are currently on a diet.

2. We do not eat REAL FOOD anymore. We eat FOOD PRODUCTS and it’s designed to look more tasty, better smelling and longer lasting. The goal of the food industry is NOT to give you a healthy product but to make a product that lasts a long time and makes a lot of profit for the company. Think about that during your next grocery store trip…

3. The best way to look better on the outside is to address the inside.

4. According to the US Department of Agriculture, Americans consume, on average, 150 pounds of sugar and artificial sweeteners a year! NASTY.

5. The best way to describe our country? Overfed but starving to death.

6. It’s NOT what you’re eating, it’s what’s eating you?

7. Understand Feast/Famine. When we eat fats/sugars, are brain immediately says, “Yes. More.” We’ve been programmed to store fat for the winter, but the winter never comes. Our bodies are designed to store extra fat to protect us from stress. If it goes through a stress, i.e. diet, your body will store an extra 10 pounds so it doesn’t experience that stress again.

8. How we should eat: HIGH nutrition, LOW calories.

9. How we shouldn’t eat: LOW nutrition, HIGH calories.

10. You can eat 10,000 calories a day and if you’re not getting the specific nutrients your body needs in a way it can digest and assimilate than your starving on a nutritional level. So your body is going to stay hungry until it gets those nutrients. But the cells don’t get nourished. So now you’re not nourished at a cellular level. Sugars tricks your body into getting nourished. And the cycle repeats…

11. Many people GIVE UP the will to fight so they go to doctors to prescribe a solution, which is always pharmaceuticals and we know those do not address the problem, just the symptoms.

12. Sugar is like nicotine. Just like the cigarette companies add more nicotine, it starts a chain reaction to wanting more and more. This is how people smoke entire packs a day and can’t explain why. The way cigarettes are addicting is the same way sugar is addicting. The problem is that people don’t know why they keep wanting more. This is called an INVISIBLE TRAP.

13. Food companies engineer addictions into many of the foods today. The food industry makes tens of billions of dollars and they have the resources to figure out what chemical derivatives are best to create concoctions that appeal to consumers and have an addictive component.

14. MSG and free glutamates are used to enhance flavor in about 80% of processed foods AND GET THIS – these names can be hidden behind 50 different names! So even if it doesn’t say MSG or free glutamates, you’re probably still eating it if it’s processed.

15. MSG and free glutamates make you want to eat more and excites the brain – which activates the fat programs that make us get fatter. If you want to study obesity, you have to study mice and to make them fat, you give them MSG. Researchers clearly know that MSG makes us obese and this crap is iin 80% of modern day foods. Don’t believe me, go google search “MSG obesity induced mice”

16. If I wanted to make a PROFITABLE food company I would focus on four things:
a) Make it look good
b) Make it last a long time
c) Make sure it tastes like the most fulfilling thing when it first hits your lips
d) Make it so you want to buy more

In short, STOP eating cookies/soda/baked goods/cake etc

17. Aspartame is so dangerous it’s forbidden from pilot programs because it’ll affect your vision and ability to fly.

18. The Yale Journal of Biology suggests that artificial sweeteners contribute to weight gain.

19. 90% of studies showing that aspartame had no side effects were funded by the sweetener companies or food industry but if you look at the independent studies, you’ll see the exact reverse. Wow, manufacturers funds the studies! Studies supporting aspartame are not independent studies.

20. Studies have shown that people who start drinking diet soda will be fatter in a couple years since when they started drinking the diet soda.

21. If you can addict a customer, you can have them for life. Selling sugar is just like selling cigarettes. Aspartame and MSG is just like nicotine. You keep putting it in because it keeps people coming back again and again. The marketing LIES to you. It says it’ll bring you benefits like sexiness, coolness and health but in reality it brings you obesity, miserableness and sickness.

You’re going to lose bone mineral density because of the phosphoric acid, you’re going to have a neurological problems because of the chemical sweeteners and the HFCS will promote diabetes and obesity

21. When you see “Fat Free” you should read, “High in sugar”. You can buy a bag of sugar that says, “100% fat free” which is true but people don’t know that the sugar turns into fat via insulin. Body stores the fat for later but later never comes!

22. HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) – people don’t understand the dangers of refining and concentrating ingredients from a product. In the 70′s Japanese scientists developed the technology to separate the fructose from the corn which was radically reducing the cost of HFCS than other forms of sugar. HFCS comes from corn but it’s not natural because it’s so concentrated and so refined, it’s a isolated nutrition . For example cocaine is clearly not good for you but it comes from the cocco leaf which is perfect for your health and it’s a healthy nutra-ceutical. It’s not addictive or anything. Eating HFCS is a lot sorting cocaine. It’s highly concentrated,refined, isolated, a chemically manipulated version found in corn, grown in corn. In short, white sugar and white flour is like snorting cocaine.

23. In the 1900s – 15g of fructose a day from fruit was average. Today, 70-80 g is average and some kids eat up to 120-150g of fructose a day – 10x more!

24 Another way to view HFCS, in terms of the glycemic index, is that it’s like jet fuel for the human body. You wouldn’t put jet fuel into your car, so why would you put it into your body? Of course not, you’ll ruin your engine.

25. Read labels. Turn them around. Salad dressing, pasta sauces, pizza sauces are high in HFSC. Stay away from the isolates. stay away from anything that is unnatural, that is a highly concentrated chemical from a planet that should be consumed in it’s full spectrum, bioavailable form. Food is delivered as a nutrient complex, not an isolate.

26. To conquer your weight, your definition of sugar must expand – breads, pastas, potatoes, waffles, pancakes, muffins etc is basically pure sugar.

27. Fat is not what makes you fat, its sugar that makes you fat.

28. If you look at how much sugar is in cereal, you might as well roll up your kids sleeves and inject heroin.

29. Food kills more people than all drugs on the earth combined.

30. It is possible to lose weight on a diet. Every time you diet its like borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. If you lose 10 pounds with shear force but you’ll pay it back with interest.
Dieting violates our bodies basic survival laws. The entire dieting paradigm is flawed. Diets are fundamentally flawed. Every time you force your body to lose weight, you force your body to gain more weight back.

31. YOUR health is under attack. We’ve created over 75,000 chemicals into the food chain since 1940! We have to move away from better living with chemistry to nature.

32. You need to get rid of the toxins, not just the fat. As long as you take in more toxins than you’re eliminating than your body won’t let you burn fat because burning the fat will just put more toxins into the body. You have to address the fact that you’re being attacked by toxins before it’ll let you lose fat.

33. Three tips to start a detox:

a) Chlorophyll rich foods (well grown organic vegetables, gelatinous plant foods i.e. chia seeds, aloe vera, sea weeds – these gels/fibers move through our intestinal tracts and absorbs the fat soluble toxins (the liver is trying to get rid of). Without the gelatinous fibers, the toxins would just get re absorbed.

b) Parsley – cleanses your entire blood supply. Learn how to make taboule salad.

c) Cilantro -binds with heavy metals from all the fish you eat. Prevents toxic mercury from getting lodged in your cells.

34. How to make FAST CHANGES in your health? If it has a shelf life, don’t eat it. The simpler your nutrition gets, the better your health gets.

35. Drink a few pounds of juice a day. Start with celery and cucumber as your base and than start adding dark leafy greens. Why not just eat our greens? Because we’re not!

36. Juicing is the ULTIMATE fast food diet. Takes minutes to prepare and dumps dozens of nutrients into your cells within 15 minutes!

36. Beware of skin fragrances. A popular brand was tested in a lab and had 21 carcinogenic chemicals that were not even listed. This stuff gets into your liver, kidneys, brain, heart and cause disease on the inside.

37. Obesity is not the problem, it’s a solution for peoples stress, traumas and dramas, lack of satisfaction, dead end job, pressure in your life, bad relationships… you get the point. Lose the stress, lose the weight.

38. It’s not what you’re eating, it’s what’s eating you!

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Most people think they’re doing well when they add multivitamins to their nutritional plan. In fact, Americans and Canadians are the greatest consumers of multivitamins in the world. We’re far from the healthiest, though.

Personally, I’ve always felt that getting my nutrients and micronutrients from whole foods is best. So I’ve never really investigated multivitamins enough to be able to say whether they’re good or bad for you. But a friend of mine, Yuri Elkaim, gave me a great education on multivitamins in a report he just wrote.

His report, The Truth about Multivitamins, goes into a lot more detail than I can share here, but I do want to pass on some key points I learned, that I’m sure will surprise you. Most of this information deals with what’s wrong with the multivitamins most people buy. The rest is about how multivitamins stand up in a comparison with whole foods.

Do you Know What you’re Taking?

If you’re like most people, you probably think that the vitamins contained in multivitamins come from foods. Sorry to disappoint you, but they’re not! Most are synthetic, and you may not like hearing what they’re made from.

Here’s a few synthetic vitamin examples that may open your eyes:

• Vitamin D – synthetic vitamin D is made from cattle brains that have been irradiated. Yes, irradiated… as in zapped with radiation.
• Vitamin C – made from hydrogenated sugar, processed with acetone. Does acetone sound familiar? It should, if you’ve ever seen a bottle of nail polish remover.
• Vitamin A – also called beta-carotene, comes from petroleum esters, refined oils and methanol. Mmmmm… tasty!
• Vitamin B – most of the B vitamins are derived from coal tar and hydrochloric acid. Lovely!

Just to make things a little more “interesting”, many of the leading multivitamins contain just under the maximum “acceptable limit” of lead, according to a 2008 FDA study.

That might be enough to make you want to drop all your multivitamins in the trash. After all, you’re busting your butt to be healthy, and then pumping your system full of those poisons? The poisons in those multivitamins are bad enough, but what’s NOT in them is nearly as bad.

Don’t Trust a Label to Tell the Whole Story

When you read “natural” on the label, you probably think it means “food”. Well, petroleum is “natural”. I suppose an argument could even be made that radiation is, too.

Don’t think that the back label is totally honest, either. Consumer Lab recently ran tests on the 38 leading multivitamin brands. Only 25 passed their tests. The rest were found to either contain less of the nutrients than the label claimed or they broke down so slowly that they would be passed through to the intestinal tract before they could be absorbed.

There are Some Good Vitamins if you’re Careful

Yuri’s report explains how you need to be very careful when shopping for multivitamins. Look for “100% from food” or “made only from whole foods”, or a similar statement on the label. He goes into more detail on specific ingredients to tell you whether the vitamins are derived from whole foods, but the label will normally tell you proudly, if they are.

If you want vitamins from cherries or grapefruit, rather than nail polish remover and petroleum, that’s the only way to be sure.

Understand, too, that getting all those natural nutrients into those capsules is a challenge. That’s why truly natural vitamins will normally tell you to take between 4 and 8 per day, rather than the 1 or 2 of the synthetic version.

The Ideal Solution

The best approach is to get as many of your vitamins as possible from whole foods. It’s safer and a lot more effective. As an example, your liver has a specific transport designed to process vitamin E. Unfortunately, it can’t transport synthetic vitamin E… taking it is a waste of money, because your body can’t use it.

Another comparison, between vitamin C from foods and the ascorbic acid you’ll get in most multivitamins, is striking. Not only is ascorbic acid only one part of complete vitamin C – the “natural” vitamin C from fruit is more effective and provides nineteen times the antioxidants as a supplement!

Vitamin A (beta-carotene) is plentiful in carrots, and almonds are loaded with vitamin E. Kiwi has loads of vitamin C and leafy greens and other foods can easily satisfy your daily needs of the B vitamins.

For some people, it may be difficult to get enough of all their vitamin and mineral requirements from their diet alone. But it’s still best to have a diet that consists of plenty of vitamin-rich foods and just make up the difference with a supplement made strictly from whole foods.

If you’d like to learn more, I suggest you find a copy of Yuri’s report, The Truth About Multivitamins. In the meantime, stop filling your system with synthetic poisons, pick your supplements carefully and get all your vitamins that you can from whole foods. I have spent years talking about muscle building supplements, and can not stress enough just how important it is that you know “exactly” what is it you are putting in to your body.

Although TV is easily one of the most BRAIN FRYING pieces of technology, watching education documentaries justifies a TV in my home. Here’s some of the notes I took last night from the documentary Food Matters:

1. Most of our food travels 1500-2000 miles and at least a week old before we eat it. We’re getting maybe 40% of the nutrients that we actually eat… not to mention that our soil is deficient of nutrients from all the pesticides, herbicides, fungicides sprayed on our soils… In short, anyone who says you can get all your nutrients from just whole foods is out to lunch…

2. Our societies values are all messed up… We are more concerned with paying rent, buying nice cars and getting the latest mobile devices instead of investing into the worlds greatest SUPER FOODS that are an INVESTMENT to our body…

3. You are what you eat. I actually prefer to say, “You are what you DON’T excrete!”

4. Less than 6% of medical doctors graduate with any nutritional knowledge in the United States.

5. The more food you cook, the more enzymes you lose. The more “raw” your plate, the more nutrients you’ll absorb. Strive for at least 50% per meal.

6. An alternative viewpoint to “Everything in moderation…” is “Moderation kills!” Sometimes the only way to win is to not play the game.

7. The ONLY time drugs should be used are for short-term or life-saving situations.

8. It’s NOT normal to be tired in the afternoon. You’re supposed to be ALIVE and VIBRANT.

9. Even if you eat plant based foods, there is a good chance you’re deficient

10. Ever find it interesting that your doctors WARNS you of the risks of taking supplements? “Supplements are dangerous/risky…” Really? Did you know that in the LAST 23 years there has only been TEN (10) deaths associated with vitamins/minerals?! And those aren’t even fully verified…. YET, in 23 years almost 2.5 million people will have died from pharmaceutical drugs, doctor prescribed, taken as directed! Why doesn’t the media report this?

11. The body has it’s own healing mechanisms and vitamins/minerals can cure literally dozens of ailments at once. It’s hard for the medical community to “get this” because they believe “1 drug = 1 disease”. How could 1 vitamin/mineral possibly cure dozens of diseases at once?! The reason is because a deficiency in ONE vitamin/mineral can results in DOZENS of illnesses.

12. It’s not the vitamins/minerals that heal your body but the fact they ENABLE your body to heal itself. When your body heals it heals. Isn’t it a doctors duty to help people get better? Why would a doctor not prescribe nutrients that help people heal? There is not ONE cell in the human body that is made out of a human drug. Giving a body drugs DOES NOT make your body healthier, it treats symptoms.

13. Most research uses very low doses of vitamins/minerals which is why many studies are often ambiguous or unimpressive…. which is often why you hear doctors and ‘experts’ say supplements are overrated etc.

14. Cardiovascular disease is a civilization disease i.e. it’s a disease of our society. Did you know that CVD is virtually unknown to entire populations of races.

15. CVD can be “REVERSED” with a diet high in fiber, primarily organic food and lots of plant based foods. CVD is a failure to take in healthy nutrients.

16. Sadly, there is no profit in selling plant based foods and stress free type lifestyles…

17. Did you know that adverse drug reaction deaths per year in the US is 10,000? Compared to 3000 motor vehicle deaths. Interesting how we’re more afraid of the later compared to our physicians recommendations….

18. Of course we need drugs but our society has bought into the belief that, “If a little is good, more must be better.” We’ve become reliant on taking a pill to fix an ill.

19. The drug industry is a half a trillion dollar industry. It wouldn’t make a lot of sense if everyone was healthy! Stock markets would crumble…

20. Drugs are regulated by drug companies! How would you feel if a restaurants hygiene policy was regulated by the restaurant owners? This is the problem with the pharmaceutical industry… These guys pay off the regulators… they pay off the academics…

21. Did you know that there are thousands of research papers showing that vitamins fix diseases but they are BLACK LISTED … many of them are NOT indexed in the US National Library of Medicine because medical research is one of the most powerful marketing weapons of drug companies.

22. Pharmaceutical companies need you to take drugs for a long to become profitable because drugs don’t cure people.

23. You need to start studying people who NEVER get diseases. What did they do? What are they doing? Would you take money advice from the guy at the pub recovering from a bad business idea?

24. We need to STOP being patients and START becoming people.

25. You don’t need a medical degree to be healthy. Start replacing wheat, corn and soy for SUPER FOODS.

26. The BEST doctor in the world is YOU. You have all the tools. Give yourself permission to listen to your body.

27. What is the ULTIMATE answer to better health and fixing the obesity epidemic? Believing that, “IF you want something done right, you need to do it yourself!” You have to walk the walk. You have to move. Take the vitamins. Chop the vegetables. Invest in the food.

When we choose QUALITY foods you will take the power back and prevent your body from being exposed to 50 random chemicals destroying your health and life.

Eating healthier is SIMPLE. It’s SAFE. It’s EFFECTIVE and it’s CHEAP. The ONLY reason people don’t do this is because they refuse to take RESPONSIBILITY for their lives.

You can watch the first 40 minutes for free here. It’s about 80 minutes total.  I watched it via Apple TV.

Which point stood out to you?  Let me know in the comments section below and let me know if there are any other nutrition documentations you would like me to summarize.

==> Want to Learn More About The Dark Side of Fat Loss?  Read This Book. HIGHLY Recommended.